Spotlights

What Are We Teaching Our Children?

By Jason Hayes, American Coal Council

There is a disturbing lack of accurate and balanced energy information provided for kids in our schools today, and if the actions of one of the nation’s venerable education-focused publishing houses were any indication, school children across the country would be ill served in this area.

In May 2011, educational publisher Scholastic removed “the United States of Energy” from its list of publications. As a non-profit coal industry association had sponsored the printing of this publication, Scholastic representatives claimed to have pulled it to remove any taint of organizational or funding [...]

Some Thoughts on Mining Tax Policy Today

By Steve Ralbovsky & Hallie Caywood, PricewaterhouseCoopers

There are two significant aspects to the current global mining tax policy debate:

The level of proposed or enacted increases in the taxes and royalties levied on mining companies; and How much data regarding mining taxes and royalties paid to governments should mining companies be required to disclose to the public?

 

These topics are interrelated since a discussion of “how much should be levied” is typically based on what is “fair” and, in order to be able to determine whether what the mining industry pays is “fair,” one should know all [...]

Correcting Al Gore’s 24 Hours of Reality

By Tom Harris, International Climate Science Coalition

Unfortunately for Al Gore, but fortunately for the rest of us, much of what we heard in his 24 Hours of Reality extravaganza was pure fantasy.

Gore is completely wrong when he tells us that the science of climate change is settled. If his “Climate Reality Project” actually did promote climate realism, he would tell us that the science is in a period of negative discovery – the more we learn, the more we realize we do not understand about this, arguably the most complex science ever tackled. Rather than [...]